Thursday, April 6, 2017

The Purpose of ISIS, Pt. 1

This is the first of a 5-part report which attempts to detail a history of the rise of ISIS and to explain its true relations to the actors involved in the war theatre. It attempts to show how and why ISIS has been exploited while attempting to answer the question: what has been the groups’ ultimate purpose in relation to the dominant powers manipulating the proxy conflict. Then, given what is known historically, it hopes to shed light on what the motivations are behind the current actions against the group and what purpose they serve.

ISIS is Born in Iraq

The origins of ISIS are buried beneath the rubble of the US
occupation.

It was out of this crucible of war and invasion that the
original grievances were born, leading analysts to conclude that “the basic
causes of the birth of ISIS” were the United States’ “destructive interventions
in the Middle East and the war in Iraq.”1

The framework underlying this being the exacerbation of
Sunni-Shia tensions in the aftermath of the invasion, which previously have
been inflamed through various other foreign interferences. These were
highlighted by the sectarian brutality of the post-invasion Iraqi government,
which then continued under Maliki later on. Given this, some have concluded
that Saddam had simply been replaced by another “repressive and murderous
authoritarian state, albeit under a more representative sectarian set up.”2

The Maliki-era repression was also marked by the
governments’ continual gravitation towards Iran, further stoking fears within
the Sunni community that Iraq would become an Iranian-backed Shia power that
would exact further reprisals against its Sunni population. Grievances were
therefore ignited not only against the violation of the occupation but as well
among even non-Islamist Sunnis who felt marginalized and threatened by their
government.3

Out of this sectarian
nexus, a man known by the name of al-Zarqawi was able to bring together various
groups of jihadists under the umbrella of “al-Qaeda in Iraq” and lay the
foundations for a sort of governmental structure which could evolve into an
eventual Islamic state.A veteran of the jihad in Afghanistan
against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Zarqawi had reportedly obtained
sanctuary in Iran where he accumulated weapons and equipment before later
returning to Iraq to oppose the US occupation.4

Following al-Zarqawi’s death at the hands of a US airstrike,
a new federation of jihadists then established the “Islamic State in Iraq” by
the end of 2006, although it was at first marked by widespread defections as
the Sunni insurgency was then losing momentum. However, evidence reveals that
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad had helped the insurgents by facilitating the flow of
jihadists into Iraq, in an apparent attempt to jeopardize the US occupation and
thereby prevent against a similar US attack against Syria.5

Yet what really allowed ISI to expand its influence were the
abuses and violence perpetrated by the US military.6 Rising to power
during his imprisonment in the infamous Camp Bucca, the group was rejuvenated
under the enhanced leadership of the mysterious to-be-named al-Baghdadi.

However, it is widely accepted that the Camp Bucca prison
served as a sort of training ground or “jihadist university” from which the
eventual Islamic State was born. The networks Baghdadi established there going
on to form the upper echelons of the groups top leadership. Indeed, without
such military detentions “it would have been impossible for so many likeminded
jihadists and insurgents to have met together safely in Iraq at that time
without such a protective atmosphere as Bucca.” In this sense, a former inmate
explains that the US did “a great favor” for the mujahideen, having “provided
us with a secure atmosphere, a bed and food, and also allowed books giving us a
great opportunity to feed our knowledge with the ideas of al-Maqdisi and the
jihadist ideology.”7

Yet the round-ups conducted by the US army were
indiscriminate and civilians were targeted wholesale, estimates from 2006
confirming that only 15% of detainees were true adherents of any kind of
extremist ideology.8 Yet now jihadists leaders like Baghdadi were
given an opportunity to further radicalize others, prisoners explaining how
“under the watchful eye of the US soldiers”, “new recruits were prepared so that
when they were freed they were ticking time bombs”, not the least of which due
to the extensively documented abuses and torture that took place there as well.9

Concurrent with this was a covert attempt by the US military
to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq by fostering alliances with other
al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunnis. Spelled out and confirmed by an army-commissioned
Rand report, the strategy was to utilize groups like ISI, who, although having
fought against the US military, could be counted on to “sow divisions in the
jihadist camp” by fighting against al-Qaeda, and thereby the US could exploit
“the common threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties.”

Mass releases from Bucca were therefore orchestrated in an
attempt to augment the strategy with manpower and engender support from the
local Sunni tribes. And while the strategy in a sense succeeded, at the same
time, it also emboldened another segment of disgruntled Sunnis, when the
original causes of their resentments were continuing under the anti-Sunni repression
of the US-backed government. The resulting sectarian violence pushed other
Sunnis into supporting ISI as the lesser of the two evils, further entrenching
the groups foothold in the country.10

Yet this was only half of the story.

By this time influential policy planners were already
thinking up other strategic uses which could be gleaned from supporting these
disgruntled Sunni radicals.

The accelerated relationship then forming between Maliki and
Iran had greatly distressed the White House. Fearing an Iranian-dominated Iraq
more so than a resurgence of al-Qaeda, in the context of a “redirection” of US
policy against Iran, it was thought that “ties between the US and moderate or
even radical Sunnis could put fear into the government of Prime Minister Maliki.”
The reasoning was that an alliance with Sunni extremists would be useful as it
would “make [Maliki] worry that the Sunnis could actually win the civil war
there”, and thus encourage him to cooperate with the US.11

Therefore, in order to remedy the Iranian influence
spreading throughout the Maliki government, clandestine operations were
adopted, the byproduct of which being the “bolstering of Sunni extremist groups
that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and
sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”12

The Fake Arab Spring

With the eruption of the crisis in Syria and the subsequent
lack of state authority that came with it, ISI was able to exploit the power
vacuum and expand its grasp beyond Iraqi borders, changing its name to the
“Islamic state in Iraq and al-Sham/the Levant” or ISIS/ISIL to reflect this
greater reach.13

The Syrian crisis itself represents just one part in a much
larger strategy by the Western powers aimed at manipulating the trajectory of
the Arab Spring uprisings to ensure that they ultimately serve the regional
agenda of the West. Having successfully thwarted the threats faced from the
self-determination and pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen,
similar but smaller protests in Syria and Libya were covertly redirected into a
pretext for attacking uncooperative regimes which had historically proven
antagonistic to Western interests.14

The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen all threatened to
wrestle away the status-quo systems of control that the Western powers had
exerted in these countries for almost half a century. This had ensured that
foreign corporations maintained easy access to valuable markets and resources
and that profits flowed primarily to Western investors.15

This framework of neoliberal reform began to be implemented
during the 1970’s when Arab republics were struggling amidst the impacts of
global economic downturns and began to institute policies largely directed from
above by international finance institutions (IFIs) such as the IMF and World
Bank. Given that the IFIs had been increasingly dominated by Western
governments, they primarily represented the interests of the financial elite
from wealthy Western countries. Therefore, the models they suggested were of
rapid economic liberalization and denationalization which on the one hand gave
Arab administrations immediate financial relief, yet at the same time, made
their economies increasingly vulnerable to exploitation by Western
multinational corporations and financial institutions.16 As some
have described, such policies had the effect of “massively restricting the
ability of [these] governments to promote policies in their own national
interests”, as they promoted rules which the UN explained “reflect an agenda
that serves only to promote dominant corporate interests”, while at the same
time rejecting the kind of policies that historically have been shown to
achieve developmental success, such as import controls, taxes on foreign
corporations, and state interference in the private sector.17

These policies resulted in the emergence of a growing
state-bourgeoisie which was able to enrich itself in a nepotistic fashion
through its proximity to influential players within the state sector, allowing
connected persons and groups primary access to newly privatized assets which
they were able to monopolize and monetize.18 These local elites
served the function of clients of the Western powers which insured that the
vast bulk of the country’s wealth would flow outwards and into the hands of
foreign investors, resulting in a system of modern day neo-colonialism from
which the United States and other previously colonial regimes were able to
maintain effective control of the region and its resources.19

Apart from the liberalization of resources the prescriptions
adopted from the IFIs included the removal of labor rights, the weakening of
trade unions, increases in worker instability, tax advantages for foreign
corporations, and the privatization of welfare systems.20 This lead
to massive increases in inequality, large concentration of wealth, and an
erosion of the previous Cold War-era social contract which had traded economic
security for political quiescence to authoritarian political structures.21

As these policies advanced these states were increasingly
unable to meet the basic needs of their citizens, and the compounding
socio-economic pressures led to the rediscovery of long-suppressed notions of
Arab dignity and self-determination which became personified within the Arab
Spring protests. In this way, the Arab Spring was primarily a result of “people
being drawn to the streets by the pressing economic grievances and uneven
development that are the result of more than thirty years of neo-liberal
policies.”22

Such movements were naturally a major threat to the
established systems of power, primarily being centered around social justice
and the rebuilding of domestic welfare states that threatened to unseat
supplicant and compliant regimes with more assertive and indigenously
representative administrations.23 Too much of a challenge for the
Western powers to bear, externally-directed counterrevolutions were conducted
to insure that such movements would be co-opted and redirected so that the
governments which resulted would maintain as much of the previous order as
possible, thereby insuring that the threatening ambitions for democracy and
self-governance were effectively crushed.24

However, for states which at the same time sat astride
coveted natural resources and had long frustrated the ambitions of Western
powers to gain greater access, local protests represented a golden opportunity
to overturn non-compliant regimes under the pretext of Arab Spring humanitarian
and democratic concerns.25 The idea was, as Durham University’s
Christopher Davidson explains, to give “ostensibly similar but evidently much
smaller-scale protest movements in Libya and Syria the sort of outside helping
hand they needed to become full-blown and state-threatening insurgencies.”26
Thus, those Western states which had insured the failure of progressive Arab
Spring movements throughout the region, “soon took the concurrent role of
funding and weaponizing a fraudulent and more violent Western-sponsored version
of the Arab Spring” in both Libya and Syria.27 The cause of such
bloody crisis therefore, being a result of these states having been
“deliberately targeted in a calculated and sustained manner by external actors
who saw a strategic use in supporting and boosting the ambitions of local
oppositionists.”28

The “fake Arab Spring” and subsequent civil wars that
resulted from these externally-directed and Western-backed insurgencies
nevertheless were successful at insuring the failure of the protesters
ambitions while as well providing the perfect environment for radicalized
extremist organizations to expand their reach and control over territory.29 Such a situation was further encouraged and
facilitated by the Western powers who, as previously explained, saw such groups
as strategically beneficial foot-soldiers which could be utilized and directed
against their enemies.

11.)Christopher Davidson, Shadow Wars, p. 367. Citing Seymour M. Hersh, “The
Redirection,” New Yorker, 5 March
2007. Remarks made by Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

25.)This was exacerbated further in Syria when Assad
rejected a pipeline proposal by Qatar which would have connected their North
Pars gas field, which is contiguous with Iran’s South Pars field and together
account for the largest gas field in the world, to European energy markets
through transitional hubs in Syria and Turkey. This would have greatly reduced
Russia’s hold over Europe through their dependence on Russian gas exports,
which now account for over a third of its energy demands. The proposal was
rejected by Assad in order to “respect the interests of [his] Russian ally”
while instead an Iranian sponsored project was put into motion, which would
have linked their South Pars field to Europe thereby increasing Russian and
Iranian influence and further frustrating the US ambition of unipolar
geopolitical dominance. See Eurostat,
“Energy production and imports”, data from July 2016.; The Guardian, “Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not
chemical weapon concern”, 30 August 2013.; Foreign
Affairs, “Putin’s Gas Attack: Is Russia Just in Syria for the Pipelines?”,
14 October, 2015.; Middle East Eye,
“The US-Russia gas pipeline war in Syria could destabalise Putin”, 30 October
2015.; EcoWatch, “Syria: Another
Pipeline War”, 25 February 2016.; For visual representation and listings of the
largest gas fields, see Wikipedia,
“South Pars / North Dome Gas-Condensate field”, and Wikipedia, “List of natural gas fields.”

26.)Christopher Davidson, Shadow Wars, p. 275.

27.)Ibid., p. 276.

28.)Ibid., p. 275.

29.)“It was the war in Syria that destabilized Iraq
when jihadi groups like ISIS, then called al-Qaeda in Iraq, found a new
battlefield where they could fight and flourish”, Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New
Sunni Revolution, p. 9.